Branded Wooden Pencils

The simple wooden pencil has been around a long time and it still proves to be very popular with customers as a promotional product. Personalised wooden pencils offer great value for money and are very practical and won’t ever leak!

Whether it’s for school use, tradeshow giveaways, golf outings or just for taking notes, we have a great range of wooden pencils, pencils sets and pencil cases which can be personalised with your brand or marketing messages.

History of the Wooden Pencil

There’s no recorded moment in history to indicate when the pencil was invented but it’s widely accepted that the Romans were first to use a ‘stylus’ or metal stick to write on wax tablets. The discovery of graphite in Cumbria, England, sometime in the early 1500s, and the realisation that graphite could be cut into small shapes with ease and used as a writing instrument was a eureka moment in the pencils evolution. It was initially believed, incorrectly, that graphite was a form of lead. ‘Lead pencil’ is a term still used today despite the fact that lead has never been used as the core material during manufacture.

The next notable change in the pencils design was to encase the core in two wooden halves, a big improvement as graphite is a relatively soft material and prone to breaking. This design concept is more or less how the pencil has remained to this day.

Another adaptation took place when it was discovered that the hardness and darkness of the graphite could be controlled through the addition of varying proportions of clay. Ultimately, this lead to the HB standards of gradations we have today. This innovation also gave artists an opportunity to use pencils to develop a new and more expressive style of drawing!